ABSTRACT
China’s population of approximately 1.2 billion, its fifty-six distinct nationalities, its recorded history of over 5,000 years, and its territory of 9.6 million square kilometers all contribute to a cultural and natural resource base that provides the country with enormous potential for tourism development. At the same time, tourism in China is distinct in that it was not recognized nor encouraged by the Chinese central government prior to 1978. Like many of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe, China had travel restrictions both within and outside of the country, for fear of Western ideological contamination. At the Chinese Communist Party’s Third Plenary Session of its eleventh Congress in 1978, the party leadership decided to shift its emphasis from political struggle to economic reconstruction. The Four Modernizations of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense were the guiding principles of President Deng Xiao Ping’s new era. These principles were reflected in a more open stance to the outside world and the open door policy was to have dramatic impact on the development of China’s tourism sector. Although much has now been written on the development of tourism in China (Zhang and Qu, 1996; Zhang, Pine, and Zhang, 2000), less attention has been given to China’s rapidly developing domestic tour-
ism market and to China’s newly emerging outbound market. The latter is the focus of this chapter, particularly in relation to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), which was returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
